by Will Emaus

Created on: April 07, 2010   Last Updated: December 03, 2011

The best decade to have grown up in?

I would definitely go with the sixties as the best decade to have grown up in.

Many have blasted the sixties as a degradation of American Society, I for one have written quite a bit on this phenomenon myself in the context of what God wanted to see accomplished vs. what actually took place during that landmark decade.

However it also stands to reason that in no other age did America change like the sixties, and in that coming together for causes like Civil Rights and against causes like Vietnam, that the youth of the 60's really did try to change the world and in many ways they did; if some of those changes had stuck we'd be living in a much better world today.

Let's take a snapshot of some of the others in comparison:

The 70's were a continuation of that, but to be honest as a child who grew up in the 70's that was also an era that was very scary. Whenever people tell me about how the 70's were rather idyllic in their experience, I always ask how many Vietnam veterans lived in their neighborhood.

If you didn't go past certain houses legitimately afraid for your life, or worry every time you rode your bike in the woods that you may not make it out of them in one piece, then you weren't exposed to the people who were truly scarred by the Vietnam experience. For many of us, the possibility of encountering someone who had been extremely affected by Vietnam coupled with "hanging out" with any of those people put quite a damper on what was an otherwise pretty good decade.

The 80's were a lot of fun, but to be honest in comparison to even the 70's, the pendulum just swung a bit too far the other way. The music all became keyboard laden, the guys all started wearing pink and light blue, in the 80s we broke so severely from the pain and activism of the 70s that in retrospect it almost seems fake. The world that the sixties turned on to, in the 80s we just turned on MTV and forgot about all of it.

That serves a purpose sometimes, but to be honest we "dumbed down" a lot of serious topics to be cool in the 80s.

The past two decades, were a takeover of mainstream culture by an "alternative" culture, to the point that there just no longer was a mainstream culture. There really hasn't been a band, or a star, or an anything to point at over an almost 20 year span that even compares to the what we had during the prior decades. Everything is so fragmented that there just no longer are any stars. Sorry, but if Michael Jackson was still such

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